The Saint of Lost Things Read online

  “The kind of girl who’d marry you,” said Antonio, with a grin. “I’m sure it won’t be hard to keep them away.”

  On only one occasion did Antonio bring Maddalena to Renato’s Pizzeria. It was early in their marriage, not long after she’d arrived in America. She wore a hat, one of her fancier dresses, and a long coat with fur on the collars. She clutched her purse and stood stiffly beside Antonio as he guided her around the tables packed with teenagers in jeans and leather jackets. Renato rushed out to greet them and kissed her hand. “The famous Maddalena,” he said in Italian. “What an honor! Nobody here thinks you can be real, the way Antonio describes you. But now we must apologize for calling him a liar.” In the corner booth, a group of teenaged girls—Cassie among them—kept whispering and giggling, as Maddalena stared at the floor. Afterward, though Renato fixed them a generous plate of antipasti then insisted they return for a proper dinner in his apartment, Maddalena declared that she did not trust him.

  “He has occhi sporchi,” she said. Dirty eyes. “Tell me you won’t go back to that place too much, not as long as we’re husband and wife.” He promised he would not and assured her that he had no need for Renato now that he was a married man. He’d taken her to visit the pizzeria only out of respect for their friendship, he explained. They walked arm in arm down Orange Street, had a good laugh at it all, and for a while Antonio believed he’d never see Renato or Buzzy again.

  But now here he is, in his usual seat at the table behind the counter. He arranges his coins in neat stacks, Buzzy shuffles the cards, and Renato leans back in his chair with his hands on his stomach like he’s just eaten a juicy steak.

  Cassie sets down a whiskey and water for Antonio. “I’ve been looking for you at Mrs. Stella’s,” she says. “Your brother doesn’t give you my regards?”

  Mrs. Stella’s is Mario’s latest adventure, an Italian restaurant he opened that spring with two men from the neighborhood. He could not invest enough to get Grasso in the name, and that simple fact may explain its success.

  “I don’t go there too often,” Antonio says.

  “The food’s not so hot,” Cassie says. “No offense to your brother, but Renato here serves the best Italian food in Delaware. What Mrs. Stella’s does have, though, is a bar.”

  “And a crowd,” Renato says. “Makes my heart sick.” He shakes his head and looks at Antonio. “I hate to repeat myself, my friend, but your brother has become the enemy. If he puts me out of business—”

  “I hardly go there anymore, baby,” Cassie interrupts. “I’ll tell all my friends about the roaches in the kitchen.”

  “There are roaches in the kitchen?” asks Antonio, his eyebrows raised.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Cassie says. “I made it up.”

  Antonio does not want his brother’s restaurant to fail. He simply distrusts any success that comes too quickly, before it is earned. He is not jealous, no matter what anybody thinks. He believes in balance, that each member of a family should have as much money as another, that any disproportion only causes problems. Antonio’s pride will not allow him to work for Mario, though he has offered many times. Not even to spare Maddalena her job at the factory will Antonio put on an apron or wash dishes for his brother.

  “Antonio wants Mrs. Stella’s for himself,” Renato says, as he studies his cards. “Am I wrong?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact you are.”

  “I don’t think so,” Renato says. He picks up a four and a three of diamonds with the seven of spades. Always lucky. Antonio has little respect for this Italian game, scopa, which he’s played for as long as he can remember. Anyone who gets the right cards can win. He prefers poker, learned only recently, which requires strategy, discipline, and more than a passing attention.

  Antonio turns to Cassie and Buzzy. “Now Renato will tell you how we almost went in together on this pizzeria,” he says. “Because you’ve only heard that story a thousand times. He forgets that was ten years ago, when I was young, when I had no wife or children.” He takes a sip of whiskey.

  “You don’t regret not owning half of this dump?” asks Buzzy.

  “Not a bit.”

  “You should have seen this man, Cassie,” says Renato. “He never slept. He had all the best ideas. He used to draw diagrams of the restaurant with crayons and tape them to my walls. He wanted to call it La Bella Trattoria: Renato Volpe and Antonio Grasso, Proprietors.”

  “La Bella Trattoria, for short,” says Antonio.

  “What about Bella T’s,” Cassie suggests, “So people could pronounce it?”

  Renato ignores her. “Then, when it came to sign the papers, his feet got cold. So I put up one hundred percent of the money myself, and now”—he winks at Cassie—“we all know who gets one hundred percent of the profits. And his name on the sign.”

  “And one hundred percent of the glory,” Buzzy says. He opens his arms, and they laugh.

  The cinder-block walls of the pizzeria are painted white and covered with various maps of Italy torn from encyclopedias. The dining area is crowded with cheap wood tables, most of which tip when you rest your elbows on them. The only luxury lies in the newly installed leather of the six booths along the far wall, but the leather has already faded and torn at the seams. The customers don’t seem to mind. Day after day they sit, eat their slices of pizza, and wave to Renato and his cooks as they stand sweating in the open kitchen.

  “You call it a dump,” Cassie says, “But to me it’s a palace.” She leans across the table to plant a kiss on Renato’s lips. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be. Not even the bar at Mrs. Stel—Mrs. Roach’s.”

  “So loyal these days,” says Buzzy, under his breath.

  Antonio has grander visions—far beyond this place, beyond Mrs. Stella’s, beyond even the crayon diagrams from ten years ago. He has not told anyone about them. He sees a band, a dance floor, a flagstone courtyard. He sees white linen tablecloths on tables under vases of fresh flowers, wood floors shiny enough to give back a reflection. The men wear sport jackets; the women remove their fur wraps to reveal glittering jewelry; they know Antonio by name and ask for their usual tables. No such place exists in Wilmington, but the city is crying out for one.

  “You still working at the car place?” Cassie asks.

  “Good memory,” says Antonio. “Ford Motor Company. Fifteen hours a day fitting armrests on next year’s models.”

  “What a waste of time,” Renato says, shaking his head. “And you know it. Yours is a sad story.”

  “Do I look sad?” Antonio says, defensively. Then he steadies himself. Renato is baiting him, and he does not want to give him the satisfaction of falling for it.

  Cassie reaches across Renato, thrusting her chest in his face, to turn up the Julius La Rosa record. They play a few tricks of scopa as she hums along to “Anywhere I Wander.” One by one they express their solidarity with La Rosa, who was recently fired live from the Arthur Godfrey Show by Godfrey himself. Only Antonio saw the actual broadcast. “Talk about someone who should be sad,” he says. “But did he let it show? Did he start blubbering there in front of the audience? No—that’s what you call class.”

  “Class and elegance,” says Cassie. “That’s what I remember most about you, Antonio Grasso. You talk more about class and elegance than any man I ever met.”

  Antonio shrugs. “Do I?”

  “I’ve got my eye on a new place,” Renato says, to no one in particular. “Corner of New Castle Avenue and Riverview Drive.” He marks the score on a guest check and shuffles the cards. “It’s got two big rooms, with marble columns in the middle. Elegant. Very much in the style of Antonio.”

  “You’re not moving the pizzeria?” asks Antonio. “Or is this a new place all together?”

  “That’s up to you, maybe,” says Renato. “Listen. I have an idea I think you’ll like.” He deals the cards, three to each player. “We all know the time has come for you to quit being a slave to Ford Motor Company and work with me. Two th
ousand dollars is all I need for this place on Riverview, this place that’s more Antonio than Renato. Two thousand dollars and it’s mine. Ours. Trattoria Renato. What do you say?” He holds up his hand. “And before you make a stink about the name, let me tell you we have to keep Renato in there somewhere for a reason, so people know to expect the same quality they get here. I learned that from a magazine. Plus, it’s common sense.”

  Antonio stares at his cards. He knows this space on Riverview; Renato brought him to it five years ago, the first time he considered opening a second location. It had a parking lot, a stone front and brand-new ovens. The back windows faced an empty lot, which could be landscaped with a little effort. His heart races. Can Renato be serious, or is this just sweeter bait?

  He drops a three of spades, and Renato immediately snaps up another seven, diamonds this time. Finally Antonio says, “Sure, uaglio. I’m in. Do you want the cash now—it’s right here in my pocket—or should I bring a check over in the morning?”

  “Joke all you want,” Renato says. “But the offer is real.”

  Nobody says anything. The record ends, and the only sound is the slap of the mop on the tile floor. Paolo, Renato’s teenaged nephew, pushes and pulls his way around the front room, looking up only now that the conversation has stopped.

  As Buzzy deals the next hand, Antonio breaks the silence. “It’s a temptation, my friend. I admit it. But those days are over for me. I need work that’s more steady.”

  “What do you think this is?” says Renato. “Once we get the customers, the money pours from the walls like a fountain! We’ll set a schedule for you, no more than fifty hours a week. You’ll have to work some nights, some weekends, holidays, but come ten o’clock, aren’t you here anyway? You might as well get paid to sit and lose at scopa.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Buzzy says. “You can’t go wrong with this one.”

  “Then where’s your money?”

  “Renato asked me the same thing. I told him—Marcie was there, you remember, gorgeous?” The girl nods as she continues to massage his shoulders. “I said, ‘Renato, my dear friend, I’m a worker, not a leader. The last thing I want in life is more responsibility. Tell me what to do, I’ll do it right, then good-bye. I want to leave at the end of the day with nothing on my mind.’”

  Renato listens, chewing on a toothpick. “So now I know,” he says.

  “Well then, I am the same,” says Antonio.

  “Bullshit,” Renato says. “In your heart, you’re a boss. You have ideas. Like me. A supervisor. I see that very clearly. And I bet if we asked the lovely Maddalena, she would agree.”

  Antonio laughs. “She can’t stand me here for one minute playing cards,” he says. “I want to see her face when I tell her Renato Volpe is now my business partner.”

  Cassie points at him. “That’s the real reason, I’ll bet. Otherwise—”

  Blood rushes to Antonio’s face. “There’s no real reason,” he says. “There are a hundred reasons. Two thousand reasons!”

  “Let’s drop it for now,” says Renato, handing him a cigar from the front pocket of his shirt. “I’m not trying to make you angry. Give yourself some time to think. Have a smoke. Talk to your wife, maybe, maybe not. I’ll say this, though—” He leans forward. His eyes are wide and hopeful as a boy’s. “It’s not every day your dream falls into your lap.”

  An hour later, Antonio is too drunk to focus on his cards. He declares it time to leave, kisses Cassie and Marcie on the cheek, then takes the long way home to walk off the whiskey. The downtown streets are quiet. A man unloads boxes from a truck in front of Angelo’s Market; another walks his dog through the gated park near St. Anthony’s. Antonio coughs to get the man’s attention, then waves when he looks up. No response. Shadows move, as if in a procession, across the dark windows of the rectory, and Antonio wonders if it’s some midnight ritual for the priests. He stops on Union and peeks into Mrs. Stella’s, but the lights are off and even Mario has gone. A gust of wind shakes the two evergreen bushes planted on either side of the stoop, and a Coca-Cola bottle rolls in circles on the sidewalk. Antonio picks up the bottle and stuffs it onto the top branch of the bush. “Merry Christmas,” he says, and turns for home.

  What might this little half city become, with his help? Maybe it is the whiskey, but Antonio is suddenly filled with love for these ten square blocks of brick and concrete. It is all his for the taking. He loves the broad slope of the hill, the hundreds—maybe thousands—of Italians who’ve become his neighbors since he moved here in ‘36. He loves the smell of bread from Lamberti’s; the red, white, and green flags that hang in the storefront windows. At sunrise, not long from now, the old men will set up their folding chairs on the street corners and spend the morning arguing politics in their campani dialects. Whenever he wants to, Antonio can shut his eyes and easily pretend that this is the village of his childhood, and then, better still, he can open his eyes and find not donkeys or dirt roads, but highways and cars and department stores. And possibility. With the right people and enough money, he can turn a place like Renato’s or Mrs. Stella’s into a destination for people as far away as Philadelphia or New York. It can all start right here, with his own people. If he doesn’t try this now, when he’s still young, then when?

  He sits on the curb across the street from his house and tosses cigarette butts into the sewer grate, too restless, his mind at too fast a gallop, to lie beside Maddalena and risk waking her with his anxious fidgeting. He gazes up at the light in their bedroom window. The rest of the houses on their street are dark. Maybe she is waiting up for him. He breathes into his cupped hands to check his breath. Only a faint trace of whiskey.

  Two tall shadows walk toward him in the glow of the city. They slow as they get closer, then stop and turn back the way they came. Their cigarettes flicker. Another man with a dog crosses in front of them. A car circles the next block, then appears twice more. He wonders if God is testing him, if He has sent this car around and around to say. That’s you, Antonio Grasso, stuck, like your friend Gianni, on the same dizzy loop. Renato can help you escape.

  If Antonio does this, he will have to move slowly. The next time he is alone and sober with Maddalena in their bedroom, he will confess his dream of owning a restaurant. At dinner soon after, he will mention the space on New Castle Avenue, in passing, to test the reaction of his family. No doubt Maddalena will start asking questions, at which point he will pretend not to have given the matter much thought. He will drop more hints, and soon she will think the idea is hers, and beg him to take the money from the drapes and put it toward the trattoria. She will quit the Golden Hem and work as a hostess. The place should be elegant enough for her, somewhere to show off her shiny dresses, the gold jewelry her mother sent, her charmingly broken English. She will be proud of him and this gift to the city. At this moment, as Antonio crosses Eighth Street toward his father’s house, it seems their best chance for a happy life.

  3

  The Silence Game

  MADDALENA WATCHES ANTONIO from the window. For the past half hour, he has sat on the curb in front of the sewer, his head in his hands. She will soothe whatever troubles him, whatever drove him from the house without a good-bye. He worries too much about money, she thinks: what to spend it on, how much to save, how long before they can move out of these six little rooms. Money has worried her, too; but if only he’d come upstairs, she’d tell him how little it matters anymore. She inches away from the windowsill, crawls back into bed, and waits.

  The smell of cigars reaches her before the man himself. Another night at Renato’s, she guesses, with whiskey and cards and loud cursing over politics. The only resistance she has shown to this has been to tell him that his shirts stink and should be aired out before he puts them back in the closet. Secretly, she has felt relieved not to be forced to entertain him during those long after-dinner hours. She can take her time with the dishes, sit for a while and talk to Mamma Nunzia, write letters, then turn the bedroom radio on
low and fall asleep to the music.

  Antonio seems surprised—happy, even—to find her awake. He kisses her forehead and sits beside her on the edge of the bed, still in his coat and hat. She wears her best nightgown, an ivory satin to which he immediately pays attention. He runs his hand over the sheer fabric, then under it, from her knee to her thigh. “How can it be that every day you get more beautiful?” he says.

  “Because you’re getting old,” she says. “Your eyesight’s not so good.”

  As he disrobes—throwing his shirt in one direction, his pants in another—he declares the weather too cold for October, the bedroom too drafty, and the city asleep too early. Even in the village, he says, the Al Di Là Café stayed open for hours past midnight, and the people kept coming.

  He repeats the same story he told at dinner, about a man he works with at the Ford plant. The man was joking around with a blowtorch, waving it above his head as if it were a flag, and by the end of the joke he’d burnt off his left earlobe and half an eyebrow.

  “I tell you,” Maddalena says, thinking, this is one of his talking nights. “Americans have no common sense.”

  He climbs into bed and immediately starts another story, this one about his boss, Mr. Hannagan, who took his wife to Mrs. Stella’s last week for her birthday dinner. After the wife spent the rest of the night with her head in the toilet, Mr. Hannagan demanded his money back. Mario refused, saying it was not his fault his wife had an “overdelicate constitution.”